Keller 05 - Hit Me

by Lawrence Block

  “I’m a rotten husband,” he said. “I didn’t bring you anything.”

  “You came back in one piece,” she said. “That’s good enough. Did you bring a story to get me all excited?”

  “Not quite yet.”

  That puzzled her, but she let it go. “Not a problem,” she said. “Tonight you won’t need a story. You know what they say about absence? Well, it’s not just the heart that grows fonder.”

  “Now, here’s a stamp I’m happy to have,” Keller said, lifting Gabon number 48 with his stamp tongs. “If you just take a quick look, you’d think it was the same as this one here. Denomination’s the same, five francs, colors are the same, and you’ve got the same picture. That’s a woman of the Fang tribe, and isn’t she pretty?”

  “Pity,” Jenny agreed.

  “When I was a little boy, I had some of these stamps. Well, ones just like them. The low values. You see this stamp? It shows a warrior, also of the Fang tribe, and he’s a man, and very fierce. But I saw the fancy headdress and always thought he was a woman. Funny, huh?”

  “Funny.”

  “Now what makes this stamp different,” Keller said, even as he slipped the stamp into the mount he’d cut for it, “is the inscription. It says ‘Congo Français,’ and the other one says ‘Afrique Equatoriale,’ so it belongs to the first of the two sets. It goes in the last blank space on the page, one I’ve been looking to fill for years now. There. Doesn’t it look nice?”

  “Nice ’tamp.”

  “Gabon was a French colony in West Africa,” he told her. “It issued stamps until 1934, when it was merged into French Equatorial Africa. Now of course it’s an independent country, but Daddy’s collection only goes to 1940, so his Gabon stamps stop in 1933.”

  “Maybe Daddy’ll take us to Gabon someday,” Julia said. “You know what we ought to get? A globe, so you could show her where all the countries are. I can see how you thought the warrior was a woman. Though you might have noticed that he’s holding a couple of spears.”

  “A fierce woman,” he said. “A globe’s a good idea. That’s probably what I should have bought instead of the stuffed rabbit.”

  “Well, globe or no globe, don’t try to take the rabbit away from her. She’ll tear your arm off.”

  “Rabbit,” Jenny said.

  “A bunny rabbit,” Keller agreed. “One of your better words, isn’t it? Now, these stamps are interesting. They aren’t very pretty, but there’s a great story that goes with them. See, they’re from German East Africa, which was a German colony before the First World War.”

  “Like Koochoo, which Daddy told you about, except even your mommy can tell where this one’s located.”

  “Kiauchau.”

  “Gesundheit. I was close, wasn’t I?”

  “You were,” Keller said. “But listen to this, will you? During the war, the post office in German East Africa couldn’t get stamps from the fatherland, so they had these printed by the evangelical mission in Wuga—”

  “Wuga,” Jenny echoed.

  “See, sweetie? Now Daddy’s talking your language.”

  “—but before they were needed, new stamps did arrive from Germany. Then, with British troops advancing, the postal authorities buried all of the Wuga stamps—”

  “Wuga. Wuga.”

  “—to keep the Brits from capturing them. Stamps! Why would they care if the enemy captured the stamps? They were overrunning the whole colony, for God’s sake.”

  “Who thought that up, the same genius who ran your Yankee post office during the War of the Northern Aggression?”

  “You’d almost think so,” he said. “After the war, before the colony was taken away from Germany and parceled out to Britain and Belgium, the Germans dug up the stamps. Most of them were so damaged from being buried that they had to be destroyed, and the rest weren’t exactly pristine, but they took them home and auctioned them off.”

  “And you’ve got a whole sheet of them.”

  “Of the seven and a half heller, yes. It’s the least expensive of the three denominations, but an actual unbroken sheet—well, let’s just say I wasn’t the only person who wanted it.”

  No one actually present in the room had fought him for it, but there was competition online, and a phone bidder who just wouldn’t quit. But here he was, trimming a large sheet of plastic mounting material to fit, and preparing a blank album page to receive it.

  The sheet was fragile, and he handled it with great delicacy. He’d have done so anyway, but having shelled out a small fortune for it made him especially careful with it.

  Would he get the money back? He’d put on CNN at breakfast, behavior uncharacteristic enough to get a raised eyebrow from Julia, if not a question. He’d been hoping for a particular news item from New York, the same one he’d hoped for at the airport bar.

  No luck. And there were so many things that could go wrong, the most likely of which being that O’Herlihy would decide to save this magnificent bottle for a special occasion, or even attempt to curry favor by passing it on to a bishop. Keller had an awful vision of the brass-bound casket ascending up the hierarchy, until it wound up carrying off the Holy Father himself.

  Things to think about while affixing an extraordinary pane of stamps to an album page. And while Jenny was standing patiently at his side, waiting for him to tell her more about what he was doing. So he told her how the Belgian portion of German East Africa had been known as Ruanda-Urundi, but when it became independent it split into two countries, Rwanda and Burundi.

  “Wanda,” Jenny said. “Rundi.”

  Twenty-One

  It’s Dot.”

  He looked up. It was remarkable how stamps took him into another dimension. He hadn’t been aware that Julia had left the room, hadn’t heard the phone ring, hadn’t heard her return, and here she was, handing him the phone.

  “Well, congratulations,” Dot said. “Your horse came in and paid a good price.”

  “Oh?”

  “There’s an online news feed that keeps you up to the minute,” she said, “and the story’s breaking right now. Respected religious leader, blah blah blah, extreme stress, blah blah blah, expected to provide invaluable testimony, blah blah blah.”

  “Sounds as though it’s mostly blah blah blah.”

  “Well, isn’t that always the way, Keller? Everything is mostly blah blah blah. What it boils down to, evidently the poor fellow got this special bottle of whiskey and it was so good he drank more than his usual amount.”

  “His usual amount,” Keller said, “was enough to float a battleship.”

  “Oh, this is interesting. Preliminary examination suggests that the alcoholic intake was exacerbated by barbiturates. The man washed down sleeping pills with booze, and that’s never a good idea, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Death by misadventure,” she said. “Now I have to wonder how you got him to take the pills. And if I had to guess, I’d say you dissolved them in the whiskey. Which would be good.”

  “Why?”

  “Because once the lab works its magic on the leftover booze, they’ll know what really happened. And that’ll keep the client from whining that he doesn’t want to pay us for something that happened all by itself. Not that I’d let him get away with that, but who needs the hassle?”

  “Not us.”

  “You betcha. So I don’t have to give the money back, and they have to send us some more. You happy?”

  “Very.”

  “And New York was all right?”

  “New York was fine.”

  “And I’ll bet you brought home some stamps. Well, you must want to go play with them, so I’ll let you go now. Now put Jenny on the phone so Aunt Dot can give her a big kiss.”

  “See?” Keller said. “I told you it wasn’t exciting.”

  “It was a problem,” Julia said, “and a complicated one, and you tried different things, and in the end you found the solution. How could that fail to be exciting?”

  “Well
…”

  “Oh, because there was no action? No slam-bang adventure? The life of the mind is exciting enough, at least for those of us who have one.”

  It was evening, and Jenny had gone to bed, clutching her new rabbit. Julia and Keller were at the kitchen table, drinking coffee with chicory.

  “I wasn’t sure it would work,” he said.

  “But you came home anyway.”

  “Well, if it didn’t work, what was I going to do about it? I didn’t have anything else to try.” He thought for a moment. “Besides, I was ready to come home. I had you and Jenny to come home to.”

  “Otherwise you’d have stayed there.”

  “Probably. But there wouldn’t have been any real point to it.”

  “More coffee?”

  “No, I’m good. Does it bother you that he was a priest?”

  “No, why should it?”

  “Well, it’s your church.”

  “Only in the most tenuous way. I’m the child of lapsed Catholics. I was baptized, that was their sole concession to their own upbringing, but it was pretty much the extent of my own involvement with the Church.”

  “I never asked you if you wanted Jenny baptized.”

  “Don’t you think I’d have said something? Do you even know what baptism is for?”

  “Isn’t it to make you a Catholic?”

  “No, darling, guilt is what makes you a Catholic. What baptism does is rid you of original sin. Do you suppose our daughter is greatly weighed down by the burden of original sin?”

  “I don’t even know how you could go about finding an original sin these days.”

  “I suppose selling somebody else’s kidney might qualify. And no, what do I care about some fat drunken priest whose greatest boast was that all his sins were strictly heterosexual? You want to know what’s exciting?”

  “What?”

  “That you can tell me all this. That we can sit here drinking coffee—”

  “Damn good coffee, too.”

  “—and either of us can tell the other anything about anything, and how many people have anything like that? God, though, I have to say I’m glad you’re home.”

  “Me, too,” Keller said.

  KELLER AT SEA

  Twenty-Two

  When Julia and Jenny got home from day care, Keller was sitting in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and a magazine, The American Stamp Dealer & Collector. He’d picked it up after he got off the phone, but couldn’t keep his mind on what he was reading. It was restless, darting all over the place. So he was more than happy to set it aside and ask his daughter what she’d learned in school that morning.

  It wasn’t a school, and the harried woman who ran it didn’t try to teach her charges much; she was happy if she managed to keep them from hitting each other and screaming their little heads off. But Jenny, Julia had reported, called it school, and took the whole enterprise very seriously. As far as she was concerned, she went there to learn stuff, and it seemed to piss her off that they weren’t teaching her to read.

  So Julia had picked up a book on phonics, and Jenny was learning to sound words out. You couldn’t always understand what she was saying, because there were words she couldn’t yet get her tongue around, but damned if she wasn’t reading.

  She had her lunch and went in for her nap, and Keller asked Julia if she’d like to go on a cruise.

  “A cruise,” she said. “You mean like on a ship? Yes, of course that’s what you mean. A cruise. You know, that sounds heavenly. When were you thinking? In the winter?”

  “Actually,” he said, “it would be sooner than that.”

  “Late fall?”

  “A lot sooner.”

  “Oh. Can you get away?”

  “There’s no work,” he said. “Getting away has never been less of a problem. Donny called me this morning, very apologetic. He’s hired on with a contractor based over in Slidell. Says the pay’s not much but he’s sick of sitting in front of the TV while he runs through his savings. At least he’ll have something to do and some money coming in.”

  “That part’s good. But he must feel awful.”

  Donny Wallings had given Keller a job when he’d first moved in with Julia, and almost before Keller knew it he’d found himself a partner in an enterprise that bought distressed homes, patched them up, and flipped them. That worked well in the early post-Katrina days, but then the economy cratered and there was no money to be had for home renovation loans, no money to finance home sales. And, just like that, no business.

  “He was concerned about us,” Keller said. “But I told him we were okay.”

  “Are we? I mean I know we are, but can we afford to pick up and go on a cruise? You know, if we can it’s actually the perfect kind of vacation. I bet Jenny’d love it, too. There are plenty of cruises out of New Orleans, and you can literally walk from here to the cruise port. Unless our ship uses the Poland Avenue terminal, and that’s what, a ten-minute ride?”

  “We’d be leaving from Fort Lauderdale,” he said.

  “In Florida?” She looked at him. “You’ve got a particular cruise in mind. Did somebody call this morning? Besides Donny?”

  He’d just got off the phone with Donny when it rang again. He picked it up, and Dot said, “Keller, I can’t help thinking you need a vacation. But before I go any further, there’s something I have to ask you. Do you get seasick?”

  “Seasick?”

  “You know, rushing to the rail, tossing your cookies, feeding the fish? Seasick, Keller. What happens to you on the high seas?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You’ve never been on a boat? And the Staten Island Ferry doesn’t count.”

  “I’ve been on the Gulf,” he said. “I don’t know if that counts. A friend of Julia’s, well, he and his wife are actually friends of both of us by now—”

  “Do I really need to know that part, Keller?”

  “Probably not. I’ve been out a few times. Fishing, but I have to admit I never caught anything.”

  “But you didn’t get seasick? Have they got waves there?”

  “It’s the Gulf of Mexico,” he said, “so yes, there are waves, but they don’t toss you around all that much. One time it was a little choppy, but I hardly noticed it.”

  “So you’re a good sailor, Keller. And the cruise ships have stabilizers, and you can always take Dramamine, so I’m sure you’ll do fine. Keller? Where’d you go?”

  “I’m right here, waiting for you to tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I thought it was perfectly obvious. You’re going on a cruise.”

  “Saturday,” Julia said. “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “If you were Jenny,” he said, “I’d congratulate you for getting your days right.”

  “My point is there’s not much time.”

  “I know.”

  “I suppose we’d have to fly over there on Friday.”

  “The ship doesn’t sail until late afternoon. We could get a flight Saturday morning and be there in plenty of time.”

  “It sails from Fort Lauderdale and returns to Fort Lauderdale. So you’re back where you started. There’s a pointlessness about it that’s curiously appealing.”

  “There is?”

  “Yet at the same time,” she said, “it won’t be entirely pointless, will it? You’ll be working.”

  “That’s right, and I can see where that might be a deal-breaker right there. There’s something I’ll have to do.”

  “Something you’ll have to do. Some passenger for whom the cruise will have a surprise ending. Do they still bury people at sea?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “There’s probably an ecological argument against it, though I couldn’t think why. People are biodegradable, aren’t they?” She stepped behind him, put her hands on his shoulders, and began to knead the muscles. “You’re all tense,” she announced. “T
his feel good?”

  “Very.”

  “I know what you do,” she said, “and I don’t entirely know how I feel about it, but I don’t seem to mind. I honestly don’t.”

  “I know.”

  “But I’m not there when it happens, am I? And in a sense I wouldn’t be this time either, in that I wouldn’t be in the room when—when what? When push came to shove?”

  “When it goes down,” he suggested.

  “That works. I wouldn’t be in the room, or I suppose you call it a cabin. Or is it a stateroom? Is there a difference between a cabin and a stateroom?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Does Dot know you’re thinking about taking me along?”

  “She suggested it.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “She apologized for the fact that it wasn’t that long since New York, and I said I didn’t really feel like being separated from you again so soon. ‘It’s a nice big cabin,’ she said. ‘Plenty of room for two.’ And she went on to say I’d be a lot less conspicuous if I had a companion.”

  “That actually makes sense.”

  “I guess.”

  “‘Look at that handsome gentleman all by himself. I wonder what his story might be.’ But with me along you’re far less interesting. I want to come.”

  “To make me less interesting?”

  “Partly that. Partly because I’ve never been on a cruise. Partly because I don’t feel like being home in New Orleans while you’re island-hopping. And partly because it scares me.”

  “Then why—”

  “‘Do the thing you’re afraid of.’ I read that somewhere. Don’t ask me where.”

  “I won’t.”

  “But as for taking Jenny—”

  “No.”

  “Even if I were deranged enough to think it was a good idea, we don’t have time to get her a passport. She’d need one, wouldn’t she?”

  “It doesn’t matter, because neither of us is nuts enough to take her. But yes, she’d have to have a passport.”